The Long Tail
August 29, 2008 | Long Tail, SEO
Naturally I read a fair bit about SEO and internet marketing. Most, particulary what relates to SEO falls into three categories, it’s either:
- So fanicful it makes the Disney film Enchanted look autobiographical
- Confusing, does the writer even understanding what they’re saying let alone the reader
- Plain incorrect
There’s quite a bit I read about SEO, even popular stuff, that either comes with an agenda, makes wildly incorrect statements or covers a lack of knowledge by using confusing names that neither the reader or author seem to understand. Some things alarm me, it’s not unusual for me when speaking with a potential client to have to reinvent the light bulb by debugging their knowledge of SEO which in some cases can be nonsense. To be honest it’s people like me, that is SEO’s, who take the brunt of that responsibility. You here something said enough times, you think it must be true.
What I keep hearing most frequently is that Long Tail Optimisation is always, that’s without fail, the way to go. If someone had given me a pound, or even a dollar, for every time I heard this I wouldn’t be writing this right now. SEO’s have really caught the Long Tail bug haven’t they? It’s not hard to think why that is?
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Long Tail, for several reasons the most important being that it actually simplifies SEO and it used to debunk the very thing I’m pointing out. However it’s now come full circle. Long Tail Strategies can often be the most effective strategy in not just SEO but also Internet Marketing, however if you read that statement the truth of it is in the word can and although vital in most cases (not all!) is not always the most effective strategy. I read a post in one of my favourite networking sites recently that made it sound like the first law of SEO is always long tail. Like I say often it is, but is not always the case. Ultimately it depends on many factors including who your market is, the reach, size and other details of a company.
If your new to our blog then let me introduce you to my number one rule, that is if you get the keywords wrong then you get the whole project wrong, if not it’s always good to hear it repeated and I don’t apologise for that. We’re currently building up quite a reputation for fixing messes, quite often the Long Tail is the root of this problem, I wonder if most of the problems with SEO nowadays stem from all we hear about the Long Tail. On several projects that have come in, in the last few weeks our research has told us that Long Tail keywords are not the most commercially viable to use in particular circumstances, this is not just one or two either. Issues with the Long Tail, stem from a poor understanding of what Long Tail actually means and how what it applies. I’m not going to repeat what others more qualified have said, an excellent article on the subject which is transparently clear is here, I highly recommend you read it.
Google Suggest rolls out
August 26, 2008 | Google, Search Engine News
Google Suggest has fully rolled out. Suggest does what you think it does, that is suggests keyword terms as you type into the keyword box.
Suggest is actually “Graduating” as the Google Blog puts it from Labs. Labs is responsible for much of the cool things that Google produces nowadays. Google employees that come up with the best ideas are allowed to focus on those ideas 20% of the time until they are either dropped or work their way up to the Lab stage and finally become fully integrated services.
Suggest has three main key functions:
- Provide a list of possible better queries
- Reduce spelling errors
- Save time with less keystrokes.
According to Google Suggest will be rolling out fully throughout this week.
Google coming to a TV near you
August 20, 2008 | Google, Search Engine News
Not exactly true but it could be, Google could be coming to your TV. If your a regular reader of our blog you’ll know we like to keep an eye on the King of Search, after all it gives us a good indicator of the latest trends in search.
So what are those cheeky scamsters at Google up to exactly. Not happy with dominating your internet connection and trying to dominate your Mobile Phone in the future they also want to dominate your TV. Google are part of the Wireless Innovation Alliance, lobbying for whitespace TV signals , that is the unused TV frequencies, to be free. A web site has even been set up to Free the Airwaves, encouraging you to not just sign a petition but actually upload a video to YouTube.
One great advantage if this goes ahead is using this medium for free wireless internet access. We also know that Google are keen on using Video as a medium for Adsense. Could we be seeing videos on our own TV’s in the future, knowing Google I wouldn’t put it passed them.
Dmoz Meta Description Tag
August 18, 2008 | SEO
We looked at the meta description tag as a powerful tool to getting the right description of your site in Google’s listing. We also looked at the keyword tag and in the previous post looked at other meta tags. As mentioned in the post there is an often overlooked power in the hands of any SEO.
However getting just the description you want can be difficult at times. Google generates a description via three sources:
- The meta description tag
- The content on your site.
- Your listing in the Open Directory.
In the third case this can cause problems. Often our clients have a listing in the open directory (dmoz.org), often a listing was created before Google started using it this way and it can often be totally inappropriate for describing a site effectively. It’s a popular method for Google to use, as the description was edited by a Human, Something very rare in the world of SEO.
You can stop Google from doing this by adding this meta tag:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>
Yahoo will also use its own directory, to stop Yahoo from using this to describe your listing you use this meta tag:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir”>
Both will stop all engines from displaying the appropriate listing if you want to target a particular engine change “robots” to the relevant engine eg. <meta name=”msnbot” content=”noodp”>
HTML Meta Tags
August 15, 2008 | SEO
We looked previously at the keywords meta tag and the description meta tag. To sumarise what we learn’t the keywords meta tag is pretty much useless and the description meta tag is the opposite and is actually extremely underused.
The power of the description is in controlling how Google describes a site in it’s listings. This is actually easier said than done, when Google works out how best to describe a listing it sometimes throws a spanner in the works so in a future post will look at how you can really enhance your listing.
Here we are going to look at other meta tags. Well the simple answer is in the main these are pretty useless as well.
There are two main problems with meta tags. ultimately they are just labels. Some labels provide useful information for certain things, for example if you sign up to Google Webmasters you have to upload a file to your server or put a meta tag in your site to authenticate that you are the owner or webmaster. Ultimately visitors aren’t going to click on your source code to be viewing your meta data because it’s of no interest to them unless they’re a web designer and they’re looking to borrow some code.
For Ranking purposes all meta data is pretty useless, in fact if you have too much unnecessary clutter in your code you lower your ratio of content to code and this will have a negative effect on your rankings.
Lets look at a few of the more common meta tags.
Author meta tag
I read recently that a site can fail one of the many different coding tests if this meta tag is not in a site. I don’t remember what it was for exactly or even if this is actually true but ultimately who cares? If you have a web site your main concern is that it is friendly and attractive to your visitors. What interests me about this tag as someone who started designing web sites over 10 years ago is this tag will often tell someone that looks if the site is designed using a cms or a wysiwyg. You can often spot these a mile of by the standard of the design. What makes me chuckle is the number of web designers who actually leave the author tag in there pages which explain they’ve used something like Dreamweaver to design their sites.
Robots tag
We’ve already covered the Robots Meta Tag in some detail. Having a follow, index is pretty useless Google’s going to index your site unless you specificially ask it not to which is what this tag is for. The real power is in having a page indexed but not followed or vice versa.
Robots Revisit
Is this important? It’s a similar story. Picture the scenario. You are Google and it’s your job to firstly index the whole web effectively. Do you think all those sites that have a Robots Revisit tag that stipulates something like 7 days are going to get Google to do exactly what they have requested when Googlebot knows you’ve not changed your page for 6 months or a year? Utterly pointless.
There is however one powerful meta tag, which is a variation of the robots tag, which if you have a listing in the open directory or Yahoo’s own directory stops Search Engines using it to describe a site in it’s listing which we will deal with in a future post.
